#GirlsWriteBack is a summer writing project hosted by the GirlSense & NonSense Blog. It features weekly essays, poems, and fiction by young women writers responding to news headlines.
By Fatima Tall
Responding to: “Northern Idaho wildfires destroy 42 homes, 79 outbuildings“, The Idaho Statesman
Today the mountains are burning
and when I say burning I mean their black sooted rooted trees
are being engulfed in this August flame
and oddly enough I laugh at the paradoxic sky
where belly bottom clouds try to float through toxic air
where opened mouth breezes try to breathe with hypoxia
while out of breath you can’t help and wonder
Is this the end of our human era?
Is this the end of our human error?
Is this the end?
We need to be in quarantine c
We need to be more intuned with our sanity
Not for the sanctity of our own lives
but for the submissive land we live on
because we are battling a dim-witted demon that doesn’t know what it wants to destroy
a demon we’ve created with leftover omniscients and backwards over- confidence
a teenage boy
with societal rage that can’t keep his hands to himself
So we must suit up soldiers with battle scars to try and control him
to scare him into a corner with snakes and gilded rainfall
while trampling over mother nature’s burnt shut eyelids.
She dreads these clumsy caustic days
She dreads these clumsy caustic people
She dreads today
because today the mountains are burning
and when I say burning
I mean they’re really burning.
GirlSense And NonSense 